On the fourth of July James set forth a decree: No more iambs or spondees or pyrrhics for me. Listen closely now, folks, as I rhapsodize plight: We are losing our poetry – our God-given right! Now the prose writers live in a poor state of rhyme, and despite my intentions they’re all out of time. Their archaic tradition makes poems sound old, and they crumble and crack like some dinosaur bones, for their verses are fossils – they’re pterodactyllic, not to mention their imagery’s far from idyllic. So now gather, all lyricists. Sound their defeat! It is time that our country stood strong on its feet – on its rhythms and patterns of metrical beat!(Original poem written for a creative writing course at Penn State. January 2013.)

On a blustery winter’s night the Earth was invaded by space aliens. No one knew how or why they arrived, but they wasted no time rolling their gargantuan amorphous bodies over towns and buildings and humans. People far enough away watched with hands on hips, curious about who exactly had come. Some postulated the cosmic amoebas had flown from a neighboring galaxy, but physicists debunked that theory. Space, they claimed, was uninhabitable, and no living being could survive a light-years’-long journey. A new theory formed: God commanded these creatures to ascend from hell as punishment for mankind. And so, while Christians and Muslims and everyone argued over whose version of hell they ascended from and whose God was punishing them, our formless foes easily engulfed entire continents. One man sought to rescue his planet. Having dealt with aliens before this invasion, he was uninterested in the religious arguments bandied about. “No one can solve a problem by talking about the problem,” Woodstock Helmes was famous for saying, and it was with this sentiment that he turned to address a small team of rag-tag volunteers as pseudopod bodies blocked sunlight and the walls of his village began crumbling down.(Written for a flash fiction collaboration: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/11/22/flash-fiction-challenge-200-words-at-a-time-part-one/)